PUSH NOTIFICATION: Florence Foster Jenkins re-birthed, ICE acts as Panchen Lama 📣
she's bumpin' that
Brats,
We all ‘bumped that’ another week in this great digital age, I applaud you, thank you for joining me on your screen. 📱😍
Make sure to adjust that screen time… unlimited use of substack, please, my little addicts. Cling to it, for it is our only refuge from our earthly terrors; cling to it until your thumb and wrist are ridden with arthritic tension. Thank god for the screen, we may let our physical world crumble now, since it is so beautiful, it fills our every need.
I hope my words drown out your thoughts, that I may lull you into a cynical nightmarish anxiety sleep, pure abysses of infinite screen. We mustn’t sit still without a moment of entertainment, we claw for another podcast or tiktok to flood our overactive receptors; the great eternal glow of the screen keeps us one, the idol of our age, the everlasting light glows on.
“And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure LITHIUM ION BATTERIES for the SCREEN, to cause the SCREEN to ILLUMINATE always. Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening to morning before the LORD: it shall be a statute for ever unto their generations on the behalf of the children of Israel.”
Exodus 27:20-21
As it is commanded.
I have found a real treasure for us this week - an artistic statement so devoid of meaning and flooded with nonsensical marketing language, that it in it of itself, devoid of the music it accompanied, constitutes a stand alone, beautifully terrible, piece of art.
I will provide the brief below in its entirety. The day was April 3rd, 2024. The International Contemporary Ensemble held a concert of new musics, much of which was lovely, enjoyable musics. It was the hard reset my brain organelle desperately needed. Until…
Sylvain Souklaye: What is left inside?
Content Notice: depiction of self harm
What is left inside? by Sylvain Souklaye is a live experience about what we desire to hear and accept to talk about. The piece expresses the granular nature of our sonic environment and how it is shaping our togetherness. From its beginning, humankind searched for ways to manifest and represent its relationship to the outside world from within. What is left inside? is an organic and synthetic immersion into collective intimacy and epigenetic dialogue. In the predominant visual language and repetitive music world, what do language and sound mean for the mind and body? Language is an instrument we take for granted, practicing it mostly in functional and conflictual contexts. Nathan Davis and Clara Warnaar are designing multiple layers of narrative percussion from apple boxes to drums, while Sylvain Souklaye is crafting a conversation where his body is an instrument. He plays with granular synthesis and ambisonic microphones to recreate an interior world. Then he translates those primal investigations into noises, sounds, and words and uses motion sensors to translate movements into synthesis. It is truly a sonic and bodily experience. Sylvain Souklaye explores the verbal and sonic viscerality of our interiority. What is left inside? is an invitation and intervention between deep listening and organized confusion. What is left inside? is an extreme love letter but also an inner warning. We emerged from the darkness, but what will happen if we lose the ability to talk to each other?
It’s almost too good to be true, I’m in shock, I cry with glee, teardrops on my guitar, even just reading it again. It may just be the diamond of the season.
I almost wish to not plead my case, as to not tarnish this perfectly made emerald with my verbose Dremel.
The final two lines are poetry beyond Shakespeare’s wildest machinations. What is left inside? obviously doesn’t know what it is. What is left inside? needs an editor. What is left inside? is message-less actions assigned infinite meaning, it is “not only an extreme love letter,” (whatever that means, perhaps of the severed ear variety, since there is no self harm to be found despite the content notice acting as subtitle), “but also an inner warning.”
Now it was hard to tell: is Sylvain Souklaye in on the joke? I wondered, is he pushing the limits of what an institution will accept from him? Is it performance art, mocking the very institution that takes his words so seriously? Are they, too, aware of this mockery? If so, I would name this piece my favorite piece of art yet seen. Splendid, heart warming, moving, effiecient. Worthy of my very limited supply of standing ovations.
But it seems perhaps Sylvain and ICE were not in on this joke, that it was in fact self-serious, that it was institutional incompetence at its finest.
The performance itself was, too, inspiringly bad. Promises of deep listening and granular synthesis are absent in practicality. Nathan Davis and Clara Wanaar seemed to be hostage victims of the programing, unwilling sonic sacrifices. Clara ran around her drum set for the first five minutes of the piece, more interesting alone than the piece at large. Sylvain began in the audience, shoeless. He shouted an improvised monologue of assonances. The content struck a very similar tone to that of the statement, just as meaning could have nearly been assigned to the direction of the soliloquy, it veered in an entirely unrelated direction, all under a moralistic tone that presumed the former and the latter were brilliantly and obviously connected.
It was a feeding frenzy, a huge achievement in discovery in my early quest for the world’s worst piece of art. Completely unaware of itself, of reality. I bend at my knees and ask Hashem, what have I done to deserve this marvelous blessing. First your son died for us, and now you supply me with this sustenance? I am not worthy.
For the modern spin on Florence-Foster-Jenkins-style-absurdity, for the idiocracy of audience members who stood and applauded, for the seriousness with which ICE presented this refuse, and for the oxymoronic poetry printed and handed to us, I give What is left inside? 9 art administrators out of 10.
To this project’s interrogative title, I answer, there was never anything inside to begin with.
Bye,
Y2KDiogenes
I got pushed.